In science,
the credit goes to the man who convinces the World,
not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
Sir Francis Darwin (1848-1925)
son of Charles Darwin
Michelson-Morley Experiment (28:46) David L. Goodstein (#41, 1986) | MU42
No. The idea is far more ancient than that...
Although Heraclides of Pontus (387-312 BC) deserves credit for suggesting that the Earth rotates around an axis, he did not yet place the Sun at the center of the Solar system (in spite of what some reports are still stating).
Copernicus (1473-1543) himself credits Aristarchus of Samos (c.310-230 BC) for the idea of an heliocentric system. This heliocentric idea is not explicited in the only surviving work of Aristarchus, where the distances and sizes of the Moon and the Sun are estimated. However, Aristarchus makes it clear that he estimated the Sun to be much bigger than the Earth (although he still underestimated its true size). This may indeed have suggested to him that the smaller body ought to be revolving around the larger one. Actually, the heliocentric views of Aristarchus are precisely known to us from the short account given in "The Sand Reckoner" by his illustrious (younger) contemporary, Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212 BC).
Incidentally, Archimedes was then seeking to present as "nonsensical" the belief in an infinite Cosmos, which Aristarchus advocated...
Plutarch (c. 45-125) reports that Seleucus of Seleucia (born c. 190 BC) was championing the heliocentric system and teaching it as an established fact, in the second century BC (Seleucia was an important Greek city in Mesopotamia, on the west bank of the Tigris River). At that exact same time, however, Hipparchus of Rhodes (190-120 BC) reverted to the geocentric belief and was instrumental in killing the heliocentric idea altogether [cf. Thomas Little Heath (1861-1940)].
The idea was strongly suppressed by the Church for centuries. Reviving it took more than a little courage from the early followers of Copernicus.
—
Tell me, why do people always say it was natural for Man
to assume that the Sun
went round the Earth,
rather than that the Earth was rotating?
—
Obviously, because it just looks
as though the Sun is going round the Earth.
—
Well, what would it have looked like,
if
it had looked as though the Earth was rotating !?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889-1951)
(in TED talk by Richard Dawkins
July 2005)
The legendary experiment, which allegedly took place at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, consisted in dropping two different weights simultaneously from the top of the Tower and supposedly recording their simultaneous arrivals on the ground... Well, one of Galileo's assistant, Vincenzio Viviani (1622-1703), did play a major role in this, but not in the way you might expect, as Viviani was not even around to witness the event, if it ever occurred!
When he became Galileo's assistant in October 1638, Viviani was only a 16-year old youth from Florence, whose promising aptitude for mathematics had earned him the commendation of Galileo's patron, the Grand Duke Ferdinand II of Tuscany. By that time, the ageing Galileo had already lived under house arrest for 5 years in Arcetri. He had lost his eyesight in 1637 and he welcomed the live-in presence of the devoted Viviani, who wrote and read for him.
When Galileo died in the evening of January 8 of 1642, he was surrounded by only three people: His own son, Vincenzio Galilei (1606-1649), his junior assistant Vincenzio Viviani and his famous new senior assistant, Evangelista Torricelli, who had joined him only weeks before:
Evangelista TorricelliEvangelista Torricelli (1608-1647) was an orphan who studied at the University of Sapienza under a former student and close friend of Galileo's, Benedetto Castelli (1578-1643). Torricelli served as Castelli's secretary from 1626 to 1632. According to Dava Sobel (author of the bestseller "Galileo's Daughter") Torricelli had first written to Galileo in the summer of 1632 to tell him how he had been converted to the Copernican views by reading Galileo's own Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, the very book which would seal the Inquisition's case against Galileo in 1633 (and have him condemned to spend the rest of his life under house arrest). In 1640, Torricelli wrote a treatise on the motion of bodies (Trattato del Moto) in which he described experimental evidence for the laws of falling bodies expressed by Galileo. As he was dying and needed help to polish his final scientific thoughts, Galileo made Torricelli his assistant in October 1641. When Galileo passed away a few weeks later, Torricelli succeeded him as professor at the Florentine Academy and as court mathematician to the Grand Duke Ferdinand. Torricelli kept working with Vincenzio Viviani, Galileo's younger assistant. In 1643, the two men invalidated Galileo's own theory about the inability of aspiration pumps to raise water above a certain height [of less than 10 m]. Torricelli and Viviani suspected that the limited tensile strength of water was not at fault, despite what Galileo had conjectured, but that the weight of the liquid column was of crucial importance. They transposed the effect to mercury and observed that if a mercury-filled glass tube is inverted into a bowl of mercury without letting any air in, then the level of mercury in the tube stabilizes at a height of about 760 mm over the level of the liquid in the bowl. In 1644, Torricelli correctly stated that the cavity above the mercury in the tube contains "absolutely nothing" and that the mercury is pushed up the tube by the pressure of the air in the atmosphere, which varies slighlty from day to day. Torricelli is thus remembered as the inventor of the barometer. (Note that the "Torricellian vacuum" in the tube actually contains mercury vapor at extremely low pressure, but this is largely irrelevant.)
When Torricelli died in 1647, Viviani suceeded him in the position Galileo had occupied only a few years earlier. In 1654, a dozen years after Galileo's death, Viviani began writing the first biography of Galileo. He clearly embellished things a little... In particular, the colorful narration of the experiment at the Leaning Tower of Pisa is a fiction invented by Viviani...
Torre pendente di Pisa What the Italians call "la Torre pendente di Pisa" is a bell tower, whose seven bells were used until 1950. The architect Bonnano Pisano began its construction on August 9, 1173 in the Campo dei Miracoli (Pisa's "Field of Miracles"). When the building reached the 3rd level (about 10 years later), its leaning was already pronounced, and construction stopped for 90 years. The main tower was completed between 1275 and 1284 by Giovanni Di Simone, who compensated for the tilt by giving the building a slight banana shape. The architect Tommaso Pisano (son of Andrea Pisano) finally added the top belfry between 1350 and 1372. In Galileo's times, more than two centuries later, the Leaning Tower of Pisa was pretty much what it is today: A building of about 14 700 000 kg rising 58.363 m above its foundations, with a 4 m overhang that would increase steadily (at a rate of about 1.2 mm per year) if it was not for regular heroic countermeasures...
Galileo's "famous experiment" at the Leaning Tower of Pisa probably never took place. Galileo himself never claimed to have performed the deed, and the fantastic decorum described by Viviani is even more unlikely. The experiment would have been largely inconclusive anyway, except to disprove the gross misconception [wrongly] attributed to Aristotle, according to which the speed of falling objects ought to be proportional to their weights (this much is easily proven wrong by less dramatic experiments which Galileo did perform). Galileo may have meant to do the grand experiment, but the idea probably occurred to him at a time when it could not be conveniently carried out, because he no longer lived next to the Tower: Galileo moved from Pisa to Padua in 1591. He had began to study falling bodies only two years earlier, in 1589.
Three years earlier, in 1586, the Dutch engineer Simon Stevin had already accomplished the key experiment by releasing simultaneously, from a height of 30 feet, two very different pieces of lead (1 pound and 10 pounds) and observing that the sounds of their impacts "could not be separated".
For the record, such experiments only "work" properly in a vacuum, where a feather and a ball of lead do fall at the same rate. (Otherwise, a given shape, size and speed imply a certain value of the air resistance which does constitute a lesser percentage of the weight of an heavier object.) Astronaut David R. Scott successfully performed Galileo's experiment (using a feather and a hammer) on the lunar surface, on August 2, 1971 [see video]. The same result is routinely demonstrated [at a much lesser cost] with an evacuated sealed tube containing two very different objects, usually a feather and a coin...
Other problems exist when conducting such experiments with the "technology" of Galileo's time, including a curious systematic error (due to muscle fatigue) when people are attempting to release simultaneously balls of different weights. A tribute to the observational skills of Galileo was that he recorded negative results to similar experiments which could be explained this way... So much for the simplicity of legendary "experiments".
Weights Make Haste: Lighter Linger (Dec. 1999) | The Legend of the Leaning Tower (Feb. 2003)
No. Galileo died 361 days before the birth of Newton. The death of one and the birth of the other occurred in different Julian years (1641 and 1642) and in different Gregorian years (1642 and 1643). The year is the same (1642) only when the death of Galileo is recorded in the Gregorian calendar (then prevalent in Italy) and the birth of Newton is recorded in the Julian calendar (still prevalent in England at the time).
Another complication may arise for Julian dates between January 1 and March 24 (included) recorded in England before 1752. The legal year in England, under the old [Julian] calendar, changed on March 25. In other words, Newton was 6 days old on December 31, 1641 and clearly 7 days old on the following day, which was legally January 1, 1641. On the other hand, Gregorian years have always been incremented on January 1.
To disambiguate the relevant dates, it's customary to specify either "O.S." (Old Style) or "N.S." (New Style) after the year number. For example, the birthdate of Joseph Priestley is properly given as: Joseph Priestley (1734-1804)
Wednesday, 13 March 1733 (O.S.)
Priestley himself would have said that he was born in 1733. Nevertheless, any consistent chronological list of scientists should indicate 1734 as the year of Priestley's birth (the exact Gregorian date was 24 March 1734 ).
Primitive Roman calendars evolved into a somewhat variable system which featured 12 short months and, on some years, a thirteenth month (called either Intercalaris or Mercedonius) whose length was ultimately decided politically... This dubious system was replaced by an early form of the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BC. After a rough start and too many leap years, the Julian calendar was given its final form by Augustus, and every fourth year was made a leap year starting with AD 8.
Our current calendar is only a slight modification of the latter Julian calendar. It's known as the Gregorian calendar because it was introduced under the authority of Gregory XIII, né Ugo Boncompagni (1502-1585), who was Pope from 1572 to 1585. The Gregorian reform of the calendar was actually engineered by the astronomer Christopher Clavius (1538-1612) after preliminary work by Luigi Lilio (c.1510-1576).
The aim was to make seasons correspond permanently to what they were under the Julian calendar in AD 325, at the time of the First Ecumenical Council of the Christian Church, the First Council of Nicea, when rules were adopted for the date of Easter (usually, the first Sunday after a full moon occurring no sooner than March 21). 10 days were dropped in 1582 (October 15 followed October 4) and new rules were devised to have only 97 leap-years in 400 years (instead of 1 in 4).
Various countries adopted the "new" calendar only much later. In particular, the earliest valid Gregorian date in England (and in what was then known as the American Colonies) is September 14, 1752, which followed September 2, 1752 (the discrepancy had grown from 10 to 11 days by that time, because the year 1700 was not a leap year in the Gregorian calendar). This happened more than a century after Newton's birth, which was thus still recorded as Christmas day of 1642, although the year in Italy was already 1643.
On the other hand, it is correct to remark that Stephen Hawking was born (January 8, 1942) exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo (January 8, 1642) since both events were recorded in the same Gregorian calendar.
This is the following relation between the vectorial and scalar potentials A and f, which would otherwise be defined with more leeway. In a classical context, this equation has some aesthetic appeal, as it makes the d'Alembertians of A and f respectively proportional to the density of current and the density of charge... In a quantum context not anticipated by Lorenz at the time, the potentials have a real significance of their own, which is happily consistent with that gauge :
The thing is very often misspelled "Lorentz Gauge" (with a "t") because of a fallacious attribution to Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853-1928; Nobel 1902). The relation was published in 1867 by the Danish physicist Ludwig V. Lorenz (1829-1891). The Danish spelling is Ludvig Valentin Lorenz. At the time, the future Dutch physicist H.A. Lorentz was only 14 years old.
Ironically, it turns out that Ludwig Lorenz is best remembered for the relation he established in 1880, building on earlier work (1878) by the young H.A. Lorentz about the theoretical index of refraction of a dielectric substance. This result is now known as the Lorentz-Lorenz relation... Spelling bee, anyone? Just a joke!
As the Internet grows, are authors getting it right ?Inclusion-Exclusion : Before 2008, I was assuming that nobody used both spellings in the same page, which is not quite true. Some Internet authors either discuss both spellings (like I'm doing here) or they think it's a good idea to let people discover their pages with either spelling... (Others simply make an occasional involuntary typo.) All told, that remark increases slightly the percentage of "correct" pages (i.e., the ratio of pages containing the correct spelling to pages containing either spelling) as given by the following formula, where R, W and B are the numbers of pages containing the right spelling, the wrong one and both (respectively):
R / (R + W - B) = 1 / [ 1 + (W - B) / R )
The right-hand-side is just a trick to enter each number only once...
It also goes to show that B merely acts as a deduction from W.
If we counted as correct just the pages which have only the right
spelling, B would be like a deduction from R instead.
Different numbers are for different Google snapshots taken on the same day.
They indicate that the quantitave result of Google queries is to be taken with a grain of salt.
If we assume that the pages which quote the wrong spelling have remained a fixed portion
(3%) of the pages which properly discuss the Lorenz gauge,
then we can estimate that there were only about a dozen such pages back in 2003.
The present page was one of the happy few!
What's now known as the Special Theory of Relativity was first completely formulated by the prolific French mathematician J. Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), who published key results with a relativistic perspective in 1898, 1900, 1904 and on June 5, 1905. Most notably, he said:
From all these results, if they are confirmed,
would arise
an entirely new kind of dynamics characterized, above all,
by the rule that no velocity can surpass the velocity of light.
Henri Poincaré (1904)
Albert Einstein discovered the whole thing independently and published his original paper on the subject on June 30, 1905. Einstein later added the adjective "special" to describe this initial theory, in contradistinction to the 1915 theory of General Relativity, his relativistic theory of gravitation (of which Einstein stands as the undisputed sole author).
Neither Einstein nor Poincaré ever quoted each other on the subject. Both, however, often cite Hendrik A. Lorentz (1853-1928) who put forth the relevant coordinate transform in 1899 and 1904, incorporating the so-called FitzGerald-Lorentz contraction, which had been proposed by George FitzGerald (1851-1901) in 1889 (and, independently, by Lorentz himself in 1892) to explain the negative result of the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887. Lorentz himself credited Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940) for first publishing the idea (in 1893).
The Scientific Writings of the Late George Francis Fitzgerald
The full Lorentz transform was first proposed in 1897 by Joseph Larmor (1857-1942) of Ireland (who is credited for the discovery, in the same year, of the classical formula for the power radiated by an accelerated charge).
10 years earlier (in 1887) Woldemar Voigt (1850-1919) had proposed a coordinate transform which explained the Michelson-Morley result (and the transverse Doppler shift ) but featured an erroneous overall scale factor implying some asymmetry between the stationary and the moving system, against relativistic principles. Yet, in hindsight, Voigt's idea of involving time as a coordinate was a key breakthrough. H.A. Lorentz and Voigt were in touch, but it took years for Lorentz to adopt this viewpoint and find a correct transform with the desirable symmetry. Voigt also introduced modern tensors into physics, a key element in Einstein's own General Theory of Relativity.
The symbol "c" for the speed of light (Einstein's constant) was introduced in 1894 by a famous student of Voigt's, Paul Drude (1863-1906). Drude used "c" for electromagnetism, but in an optical context he retained the symbol "V" which had been introduced by James Clerk Maxwell. Einstein himself used "V" until 1907.
The famous equation E = m c 2 has been spotted several times times before Albert Einstein proposed it, in September 1905. Such reports include:
The Special Theory of Relativity did not take off until 1908, when Max Planck (1858-1947) put his considerable weight in the balance and wrote a paper on the subject. The same year, Hermann Minkowski expresssed the Maxwell-Lorentz equations [of electromagnetism] relativistically in tensor form, and showed that Newton's theory of gravity was not consistent with Special Relativity.
The whole controversy may have been one of the reasons why Relativity was not mentioned in 1921 when Einstein was awarded the Nobel prize. Instead, Einstein was officially rewarded for his 1905 explanation of the laws of the photoelectric effect, which may be construed as a discovery of the photon. In 1912 (the year Poincaré died) Wien had even proposed that Lorentz and Einstein share the Nobel prize for Special Relativity, because:
[...] the merits of both investigators [are] comparable.
Some authors have felt that Einstein's huge fame was not entirely deserved, but calling him a plagiarist is certainly not fair: Just like any other genius in history, Albert Einstein had to build on the work of his elders. Period.
Most of Einstein's precursors were about 25 years older than himself. They were all the heirs of Maxwell (1831-1879) who died the year Einstein was born...
Maxwell's key contribution was his set of differential equations unifying electricity and magnetism, and predicting electromagnetic propagation at a fixed celerity. Their mathematical form seemed to make them only valid in some fixed "aether". Relativity was born with the gradual realization that Maxwell's equations should hold unchanged even for observers in relative uniform motion. The nontrivial coordinate relations postulated by the Lorentz transform allowed just that.
Before Maxwell, those who paved the road include a few French physicists:
f = 1 - 1/n2
However, the very same observation with uranium salts and photographic plates had been made 39 years earlier (in 1857) by Abel Nièpce de Saint-Victor (1805-1870) whose first cousin Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833) had invented photography in 1826.
That early discovery was duly heralded as major at the time (1857) in particular by the chemist Michel Chevreul (1786-1889) who was then the superior of Abel Niepce. Chevreul is one of the 72 major French scientists whose names appear on the Eiffel Tower. However, the World was apparently not quite ready for that yet... By the time of Becquerel's own re-discovery (1896) the previous work of Niépce de Saint-Victor had apparently been all but forgotten...
Curiously enough, one of the few noteworthy physicists who did notice in due time was Becquerel's own father! Edmond Becquerel (1820-1891) fully discussed the future discovery of his son in the book he published in 1868 (La lumière, ses causes et ses effets). At the time, the younger Becquerel was 16, but it's hard to believe he never read the book of his father. The record clearly shows that he had totally forgotten about that book 28 years after its publication, since he never mentioned it. His father was no longer around to point that out to him...
Not entirely. Much of the credit should have gone to his graduate student Harvey Fletcher, who was not even named a co-author of the key relevant paper. Originally, Millikan reproduced an experiment involving drops of water, conceived by J.J. Thompson and E. Regener. On this subject, let's quote David Goodstein, who is sympathetic to Millikan:
Unfortunately the single-droplet method had a serious flaw. The water evaporated too rapidly to allow accurate measurements. Millikan, Begeman and a new graduate student named Harvey Fletcher discussed the situation and decided to try to do the experiment with some substance that evaporated less rapidly than water. Millikan assigned to Fletcher the job of devising a way to do the experiment using mercury or glycerin or oil. Fletcher immediately got a crude apparatus working, using tiny droplets of watch oil made by means of a perfume atomizer he bought in a drugstore. When he focused his telescope on the suspended oil droplets, he could see them dancing around in what is called Brownian motion, caused by impacts of unseen air molecules. This itself was a phenomenon of considerable current scientific interest. When Fletcher got the busy Millikan to look through his telescope at the dancing suspended droplets of oil, Millikan immediately dropped all work on water, and turned his attention to refining the oil-drop method.
A couple of years later (around 1910) Fletcher and Millikan had produced two results. One was an accurate determination of the unit electric charge (called e) from observing the rate of fall or rise of oil drops in gravitational and electric fields, and the other was a determination of the product Ne, where N is a separate constant called Avagadro's number. The product Ne came out of observations of Brownian motion. Millikan approached his student Fletcher with a deal. Fletcher could use a published paper as his Ph.D. thesis, but only if he was sole author. Millikan proposed that Fletcher be sole author on the Brownian motion work and that he, Millikan be sole author on the unit electric charge work. This is the source of the assertion that Millikan mistreated his graduate students. No doubt Millikan understood that the measurement of e would establish his reputation, and he wanted the credit for himself. Fletcher understood this too, and he was somewhat disappointed, but Millikan had been his protector and champion throughout his graduate career, and so he had little choice but to accept the deal. The two men remained good friends throughout their lives, and Fletcher saw to it that this version of the story was not published until after Millikan's death, and after his own death.
Harvey Fletcher (1884-1981) himself summarized his collaboration with Millikan in the June 1962 issue of Physics Today. There were in fact 5 papers involved; Millikan is named as sole author of the first (and most important) one, Fletcher is named as the sole author of 2 others (including the one he used as his doctoral dissertation) and the last two appeared with both names as joint authors.
"Good to the Last Drop?
Millikan Stories as Canned Pedagogy" by
Ullica
Segerstråle
Science and Engineering Ethics
Volume 1, #3 (July 1995).
As we compiled a rather large catalog of physical units over the years, we found a large number of errors throughout the literature. They propagate at an alarming rate. We've lost track of most of the sources, but feel compelled to post the following list of errata, as a public service. (If you must know, this list is sorted alphabetically with respect to the main unit, scale, quantity, or concept involved.)
These have been thoroughly investigated, so we may hope to avoid the same embarrassment as one author who made a similar claim (about the rarely-used "poncelet" unit) and got it wrong!
We did pay particular attention to wrong claims that we found more than once... At times, it really looks like nobody ever bothers to check mathematical facts. One particularly startling example is our first entry, about the Beaufort rating of an 18 mph wind, for which we have yet to find a single correct table!
Before I wrote the first version of this article, every biography of the great French mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752-1833) showed a lithograph which was also associated with an unrelated contemporary politician named Louis Legendre (1752-1797)...
The godfather of Louis Legendre was "officier de bouche" of the Queen.
Louis himself served as a sailor for 10 years before setting up shop as
a butcher in Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Paris).
He was a leader in the Storming of the Bastille
(July 14, 1789).
In spite of his lack of education and problems with diction, his early enthusiasm for
revolutionary ideas got him elected to the National Convention and he served as
its president.
The allegiances of Louis Legendre to various
revolutionary leaders changed several times.
He was already suffering from dementia when he got elected to what would be
his last position, at the Conseil des 500.
The above lithograph is signed by François-Séraphin Delpech (1778-1825) who is also known for his later collaboration with Zéphirin Belliard (1798-fl.1843?) on a portrait of the young Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877).
The Encyclopedia Britannica has erroneously presented the above as a reproduction by Delpech of a painting due to Belliard, although Louis Legendre died the year before Zéphirin Belliard was born!
The Belgian writer Jacques Noizet correctly identified this picture with portrait number 13 in another lithograph representing the entire political group of Louis Legendre (les Montagnards) as of 1793. That picture appears, for example, on page 678 of Dictionnaire d'Histoire de France (Perrin, 1981).
The whole issue had been actively discussed on the Internet for several months before I became aware of the controversy, as Jean-Bernard François (2007年10月31日) quoted my own thumbnail rendition of the coat-of-arms of Adrien-Marie Legendre (of which I have since published a better full-sized depiction).
I then discovered one obscure record showing that the library of the Institut de France had a portrait of the mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre, which had been totally overlooked! It appears in a sketchbook of 73 caricatures (73 portraits-charge de membres de l'Institut) next to a similar caricature of Fourier (heads in full color, bodies lightly drawn in pencil).
After securing a great contact at the library of the Institut de France (from a retired French librarian, Jeanne Refleu, the widow of my late math teacher Lucien Refleu) I failed to follow through for several months. I just posted my discovery here, without fetching the actual picture... This grabbed the attention of the aforementioned Jean-Bernard François (a.k.a. Infofiltrage ) who did the legwork and kindly presented me with a photograph of the relevant page from that sketchbook (on 2008年12月28日).
Thus, the caricature at right seems to be the only extant portrait of the great mathematician!
Album de 73
portraits-charge aquarellés
des membres de l'Institut (1820)
by
Julien-Léopold Boilly (1796-1874)
(wrongly attributed to his father, Louis-Léopold Boilly, 1761-1845)
Courtesy of Biliothèque de l'Institut de France
In the U.S. at least
the above drawing is clearly in the public domain (as a straight
reproduction
of a two-dimensional work
created well before 1888 by someone who died well before 1938).
It is clear that the aforementioned article of Peter Duren in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (Dec. 2009) has done more than all previous efforts to popularize this unique portrait of Adrien-Marie Legendre.
"The Mathematicians",
a digital painting by an artist identified as
The Alucinor
(2008年08月25日)
Group portrait of 35 major
mathematicians (out of necessity, some faces are purely fictional).
At left is the painting still most commonly used to evoke the famous surgeon. At right is the true portrait inherited by his descendants...
There was at least one question about this (by someone signing "Firmin") in one printed ancestor of Internet forums: L'intermédiaire des chercheurs et curieux (1043, 49, p.897, June 1904).
Dr. Le Paulmier obtained that previously unpublished portrait from the archives of the descendants of Catherine Paré and Claude Hedelin. He could establish that it was painted just after the second wedding of Ambroise Paré.
Painting (1835) by Granger.
To anyone primarily interested in science or mathematics, there's only one "Apollonius" worth remembering: Apollonius of Perga (262-190 BC). Just like there's only one Archimedes worth mentioning.
However, one unrelated Apollonius of Tyana became extremely famous, a couple of centuries later, as a religious figure (which some have likened to Christ). All coins and statues made in the image of "Apollonius" are meant to represent that other man, as the slightest bit of research will show...
"The Life of Apollonius of Tyana" by Philostratus the Elder | The missing portrait of Apollonius of Perga
Robert Hooke (1635-1703) and Isaac Newton (1643-1727) were major scientific rivals who had been bitterly feuding since 1686. In 1703, Hooke died and Newton took over the Presidency of the Royal Society.
It seems that Hooke had commisioned at least two portraits of himself but none of them were ever seen after his death...
At some obscure point in History, someone saw fit to put those two facts together and the legend was born that Newton had his revenge after his rival's death by unhanging from the walls of the Royal Society any portrait of Hooke which had fallen under his care (Newton wasn't a nice man). In that urban legend, there was supposedly just one such portrait, thereafter known as the missing portrait of Hooke.
In the milder version of the story, Hooke's portrait was just left to decay unattended in some damp storage. In the more dramatic version, Newton himself destroyed a portrait bequeathed to the Royal Society. That's is now part of folklore... For example, Newton is shown slashing Hooke's portrait in the final scene of The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes (produced in 2008-2009 by the Royal Shakespeare Company)/
My own guess is that Newton had little to do with the missing portrait(s): There's evidence to suggest that Hooke had thyroid eyes, which can be responsible for stunning female faces (e.g., Bette Davis or Susan Sarandon) as well as uneasing male looks (e.g., Marty Feldmann or Rodney Dangerfield). Hooke may have disliked his own appearance so much that he rejected any portrait of himself as either ugly or inaccurate. He wouldn't have it either way. He didn't want to leave a bad image for posterity. Literally.
Hooke had (at least) two portraits of himself made. They're both lost.
The entry for 16 October 1674 in Hooke's personal diary gives a clue. He wrote: "At Garaways [Coffee House]. Left off taking tobacco — Mr Bonust drew picture."
In this, Hooke probably misspelled the name of Mr. Bownest, a noted portrait engraver of the time. We don't know if Bownest's sketch ever got turned into a proper engraving or painting. Hooke knew several other portraitists, including Mary Beale (1633-1699) who made a portrait of his mentor, colleague and friend, Robert Boyle (1627-1691).
However, there is no extant trace of a portrait of Hooke anywhere now. Neither in the inventory of Hooke's possessions after his passing nor in the records of gifts made to the Royal Society.
Therefore, we must fall back to several written descriptons of Hooke which say that he had dark hair, a pointed chin, prominent bulging grey eyes (bilateral proptosis) a hunched back and an emaciated figure.
Several of those traits may indicate that Hooke was suffering from a severe case of Graves' disease (TED). Other notorious TED sufferers include:
An imprint of the seal of Robert Hooke exists at the County Record Office on the Isle of Wight, next to Hooke's unmistakable signature. It presumably bears a likeness of Hooke at the time when he started to wear a periwig on a regular basis (mid to late 1670s).
Seal of Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke (1635-1703)
Hooke,
Newton, and the missing portrait by
Felicity Henderspn
(2010年12月03日).
Hooke to Hang in London
by James Dacey (PhysicsWorld, 2012年01月12日).
New portrait to mark Hooke's place in history
(Institute of Physics, 2012年01月12日).
Where is Robert Hooke?
by Katherine Larson (Corning Museum of Glass, 2016年08月18日).
Hooke, Newton and the 'missing' portrait.
In Robert Hooke's London (2013年05月15日).
Robert Hooke and the Wrath of
Isaac Newton by Daryl Worthington (2016年08月22日).
Numericana Biography of Robert Hooke
Like most biographers of Hooke, the late Lisa Jardine (HonFRS, 2015) was lamenting the lack of a portrait of Robert Hooke.
Unfortunately for her, as she was getting her biography of Hooke ready for publication, it was realized that a painting attributed to Mary Beale (1633-1799) could not possibly be a portrait of John Ray as previously advertised (it doesn't look at all like other well-documented portraits of Ray).
Robert Hooke certainly knew Mary Beale. Although we don't know for sure, it's thus quite possible that Beale was once commissioned by Hooke to do a portrait of himself. That flimsy bit of circumstancial evidence was enough of an incentive to make Dr. Jardine succomb to wishful thinking and jump to the conclusion that the previously misidentified portrait was the long-lost portrait of Hooke. She chose to ignore the fact that the picture doesn't fit at all any element in the well-known descriptions of Hooke's appearance: Dark hair, emaciated figure, hunched back, pointed chin and --above all-- prominent bulging grey eyes.
After presenting rather flimsy circumstancial evidence, Dr. Jardine threw caution to the wind and thought she could safely put the full portrait on the cover of a biography of Hooke, thus offering it to the World as the new official portrait of Robert Hooke. She wrote:
I propose to claim this portrait as Robert Hooke's until it is proved to me that this is in fact recognisably a portrait of somebody else. Since I discovered my Hooke I confess that I have found it much easier to reconjure in my own mind the man to match the image. I hope my portrait of Hooke will make it possible for the reader of this book to do likewise. For Hooke, I believe, is a man we should learn to treat with affection, in and for himself, as well as to admire.
A stunned reviewer called it a hitherto unknown portrait of Hooke.
Jardine's challenge was met as soon as her book was out (and the cover widely publicised). It was a very easy thing to do, as discussed below: The portrait is merely a faithful reproduction of an earlier woodcut representing a major scientist of the previous generation J.B. Van Helmont (1577-1644) surrounded by his son and their family arms. Positive identification if there ever was one! The only surprise is that the protrait had not been correctlty identified earlier!
The misidentified picture is still all over the Internet. Sadly, Jardine's blunder now hinders also the correct depiction of Van Helmont, who is just as significant for Science as Hooke.
To the best of my knowledge, the late Dr. Jardine never apologized for this. Nor did the publisher try to minimize the consequences: The wrong portrait was knowingly put on the spline of the paperback edition. The non-buldging non-blue right eye is still on the front cover (in a peephole). The full portait iself is reproduced twice inside (once in full color). The blunder from the first edition is nowhere corrected; it's not even mentioned. This is a disgrace which robs that portrait from its rightful place in the History of Science:
England's Leonardo Revealed
by Lisa Jardine (The Times, 2001年09月06日).
"The
Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man who Measured London" by Lisa Jardine.
Reviews:
Complete Review
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The Guardian
A disputed portrait of Robert Hooke may in fact show a
contemporary by Philip Ball (Nature, 2005年01月20日).
Legend has it that the picture at right once belonged to the Anglo-Irish naturalist Sir Hans Sloane, first Baronet (1660-1743). Sloane was elected FRS in 1685 and served as President of the Royal Society from 1727 (suceeding Newton) to 1741. He was an avid collector noted for bequeathing his personal collection to the Britsh People, thus bringing about the foundation of the British Museum (1753).
Sloane apparently gave the portrait to the scientist William Watson (1715-1787) a botanist who is noted for formulating the conservation of electric charge before 1746, independently of Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790).
Watson thought that the portrait had been made around 1674 by Mary Beale (1633-1699) and represented the parson-naturalist John Ray (1627-1705) who had spelled his own name John Wray until 1670.
He bequeathed the portrait to the British Museum. Upon his death, in 1787, they took possession of it, but nobody noticed that Watson's identification couldn't possibly be correct, as the portrait looks very different from all known depictions of John Ray. The mistake was thus allowed to stand for two more centuries...
The mislabeled portrait went to the Natural History Museum when it split off from the British Museum and moved to South Kensington in 1881-1883.
The mistake was duly spotted by Susan Snell, Archivist and Records Officer of the Natural History Museum (London, England).
An etching of the exact same portrait is found in the 1648 edition of...
Lisa Jardine had been looking for the lost portrait(s) of Robert Hooke for some years and she contracted a terminal case of wishful thiking when she learned about the mislabeling. She hastily called it a portrait of Robert Hooke, against all evidence which firmly disproved that! In print, she simply challenged anybody to prove "to her" that it was the portrait of somebody else. Unexpectedly and unfortunately for her, this was a surprisingly easy thing to do...
The challenge was met immediately (2004) independently, by William B. Jensen (University of Cincinatti) and Dr. Andreas Pechtl (Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz).
[画像: Come back later, we're still working on this one... ]
Mary Beale (1633-1699)
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140 artworks attributed to Mary Beale
A Previously Unrecognised
Portrait of Joan Baptista Van Helmont by William B. Jensen (Nov. 2004).
In a scientific context, Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) is often credited for the following words, which Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) wrote in 1818:
